Confessions of a Privileged White Male and Former Conservative

This post appears in full on my blog here.

…We didn’t think of ourselves as rich. We felt pretty average. My dad was on the fire department, and semi-retired into running a little accounting practice out of our house. My mom was a teacher’s aide in the school system. I went to private Catholic schools, but mostly on scholarship. There were things we couldn’t afford for sure. We didn’t eat out much, nor did we go on expensive vacations. Our big trip was driving down to Disney World by car when I was 10. I made NYU, but couldn’t afford to go.

We didn’t feel “privileged” at all. We felt middle class, even though we above the middle of NYC’s per capita household income.

In fact, up until as recently as a year ago, the word privilege, especially in the phrase “white privilege” made me bristle. I was incredibly bothered by the idea that somehow I was a “have” and that I didn’t get to where I was purely on my own work ethic.

No one likes to thank the wind at their back — particularly not middle class white people.

I was way more “self made” than the Ivy Leaguers who went into finance. I was proud of the fact that I was the Fordham grad in a crowd of Harvard, MIT and Princeton at my investment internship. Being the local guy climbing up from the mailroom (which was literally my first job), was part of my identity. My family’s name isn’t on any buildings and they didn’t have the money to fund my investments, so I felt like I didn’t have help to break into my industry.

I quickly forgot that I had ever interviewed at McDonald’s for a summer job. I also forgot that I was embarrassed to do so. My brothers were embarrassed on my behalf when they found out that I had applied. Flipping burgers wasn’t something anyone in our family was going to do — so they both actually found me the same kind of “respectable” mailroom job at their respective brokerage firms on Wall Street.

We never specifically said that I shouldn’t flip burgers because I was white — but that’s what it was. We were just somehow “past that stage” economically and socially, so I was able to use my family connections to get a more respectable job. Nevermind that I had friends who worked at summer beach clubs. It seemed fine to be handing someone in a mostly white environment their burger, while the Golden Arches seemed “beneath me”.

Getting that mailroom job through connections wasn’t the same, in our eyes, as the way wealthy white people used the “Old Boy’s Club”. That was something else altogether. This was just what you did for your family to “help out.” I felt lucky to have that connection, but not privileged…

…Over six years, culminating in the news that a little black kid got shot carrying a toy gun that looked way less harmful than the toy guns you ran around with as a kid, I learned for sure that I am privileged.

I am privileged by being white.

I am privileged by being male.

I am privileged by being straight.